Like many short-form video creators, Jorge Soto got his start on TikTok. But a year and a half after uploading his first video to TikTok in March 2020, he gave YouTube’s TikTok clone a try.“In two months, I gained a million subscribers, which is crazy,” Soto said in the third episode of the Digiday Podcast’s four-part series on short-form vertical video creators.Initially, Soto would repurpose his TikTok videos — skits and what he calls “storytimes” — as YouTube Shorts. But eventually he shifted to producing first for YouTube Shorts and repurposing those videos for TikTok.“I felt like, me as a creator, I was better off on YouTube because I had the access to long-form and the algorithm is a little — I don’t want to say it’s easier on YouTube Shorts, but it just makes sense,” said Soto. For example, his storytime format, in which he recalls a story from his life, performs reliably well on YouTube, and he’s able to see if one storytime video does well, then a similar one should perform similarly.But as Soto implied, Shorts is not the be-all, end-all of his YouTube strategy. Shorts are a means of driving viewership for his long-form videos. Those long-form videos bring in the bulk of the money Soto makes on YouTube, whereas through the YouTube Shorts ad revenue-sharing program, Soto receives five to six cents per thousand views.“It’s already a privilege to make money off short-form, so anything I’ll just take, frankly. But the way that I see it is short-form brings the audience,” Soto said.

If Snapchat wants to prove to creators that they can make serious money by posting videos on its short-form vertical video platform, it may not need much more evidence than Alyssa McKay.“I’m on this Snapchat mid-roll [ad] program, which I’ve been part of since last May. I’ve made over a million dollars from Snapchat mid-roll,” McKay said in the second episode of the Digiday Podcast’s four-part series on short-form vertical video creators. She added, “Snapchat changed my life entirely.”Last week Snap expanded that mid-roll program to more creators who can receive a share of revenue from ads running against their Snapchat Stories. TikTok and YouTube Shorts have similarly stood up ad revenue-sharing programs for short-form video creators in the past year, but neither platform has yet had much to show for how much money creators can make directly from their platforms. With 2 million followers and an average 2.5 billion monthly views on the platform, McKay is showing the story may be different on Snapchat.“I definitely make the most on Snapchat. There’s revenue streams of course from YouTube and the TikTok Creator Fund, but Snapchat definitely has been the lion’s share of my revenue this past year,” she said.

In the possible scenario in which TikTok gets banned in the United States, TikTokers like Kat Stickler will need to rely on other platforms to maintain their followings and their brand partnerships.But Stickler, who has almost 10 million followers on TikTok, isn’t worried. That’s partially due to the fact that she already has over 1 million Instagram followers, 268,000 YouTube subscribers and 116,000 followers on Facebook. She's also heartened by brands already shifting their influencer marketing dollars to other platforms for fear that the ads they buy on TikTok won’t be as evergreen as they once were.On the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, Stickler kicks off the third-annual Creator Series — a four-week-long span of episodes — that will look at the rise of short-form vertical video and how creators, like Stickler, have been able to grow sizable followings.

Publishers' events businesses have been a bright spot in an otherwise grim economic climate. While trade publishers and consumer publishers have different approaches to how events fit in their portfolios, both are benefiting from advertisers wanting face-to-face impressions with prospective customers.VentureBeat’s total revenue increased by 50% year over year from 2021 to 2022. And despite having an events business for more than 15 years, the company’s events revenue increased by about 100% during that same time period, said Gina Joseph, the company’s newly appointed chief strategy officer, who was promoted last month, though she did not provide exact figures.In Joseph's five years at VentureBeat, she implemented VB Lab, a structure for how the company’s sales team custom would build campaigns for each individual advertiser. During the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast, she discussed how VB Lab’s impacted VentureBeat’s bottom line in the four-and-a-half years since its launch, as well as how her appointment to CSO marks DE&I history in the publishing industry.

Advertising has been a tumultuous business for some time now, but the one section of that market that’s been holding its own for publishers is events.Part of the reason for that is that brands themselves are realizing that they need to differentiate themselves with consumers, which — according to Lindsey Abramo, the recently appointed CRO of Leaf Group, who was a guest of a live taping of the Digiday Podcast during the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado last month — has opened up an opportunity for Leaf Group to sell it’s existing event franchises to sponsors.Leaf Group’s art and commerce side of the business, which includes art marketplaces Society6 and Saatchi Art, is not reliant on advertising revenue, according to Abramo. That’s a revenue stream that’s pretty much specific to its media arm, which includes its editorial brands Hunker, Well + Good and Livestrong brands. But now, advertising is being added to Leaf’s other art- and commerce-based events including The Other Art Fair, and through that addition, events have become one of the more lucrative areas of the business, she said.“Not only are our ticket sales up 25%, but so are sponsorship fees, and this is not over last year, this is up over 2019 prices,” said Abramo.

Lynette Kaylor’s background does not mirror that of a traditional TV ad sales boss. But her history in data and identity technology does indicate the makeup of a modern TV ad sales boss.Before joining Fubo as the streaming pay-TV service’s svp of advertising sales last August, Kaylor worked at Dentsu’s data arm Merkle where she worked on identity tech partnerships with publishers and platforms — which is kind of a perfect pedigree for someone overseeing a streaming ad business today.“Data is only going to become more and more important. And given my background, obviously I feel that way. But it makes sense to me from a buyer and seller [perspective],” Kaylor said in the latest Digiday Podcast episode. “From a seller perspective, let me show you why you want to buy my audience, look at what makes them unique and great. From the buy side, it’s like, ’Oh yeah, I want to stop wasting money,’” she added.Among Kaylor’s most immediate tasks is building Fubo’s first-party data strategy as advertisers seek to make their streaming campaigns more targeted and more measurable. That includes developing the company’s data clean room strategy, which has become more of a focal point among TV and streaming ad businesses over the past few years.“A big conversation right now is clean rooms and where do those fit in. When I was at Merkle, those were kind of just starting out, and now they seem to be in every conversation,” said Kaylor.

As The Guardian’s fiscal year concludes on March 31, Luis Romero, the publication's svp of advertising in North America, acknowledged that his team has had a “late start” to receiving RFPs and budget planning with advertisers and agencies for the rest of 2023. However, those conversations picked up in the “last couple of weeks,” with several of last year's major advertisers starting to talk about renewing deals this year.Outside of the macroeconomic pressure on advertisers’ budgets, Romero’s team has been challenged by keyword blocklists. Advertisers’ brand safety concerns outweigh the desire to market to news publishers’ large and lucrative audiences, causing them to all but eliminate news content from their programmatic buys. But for advertisers still willing to place ads on news publishers’ sites, like The Guardian, third-party verification firms are added to the equation, putting the publishers through the brand safety ringer to grade how safe and reliable that content ends up being before advertisers are willing to commit.All this ladders up to The Guardian’s CPMs getting lowered by 25% when content is deemed unsafe, according to Romero on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast. “Typically [about 1% of] our inventory is flagged for unsafe content on any given day, but when there's a major news event, like the Syrian-Turkish earthquake, it swells up to 10 to 15%. We lose revenue,” he added.With the saga of challenges around the programmatic open marketplace persisting — though his team is working with other industry players to try and fix these issues — focusing on direct-sold advertising and programmatic direct in the meantime is the name of the game. In tandem with this strategy, Romero’s team is pushing more sponsorships around tentpole world events and less on breaking news content in order to try and resolve some of the advertisers’ brand safety concerns, as well as upsell them on larger, more cohesive offerings.

At the end of this month, publishing executives from around the country with gather together in Vail, Colo., for the three-day Digiday Publishing Summit to discuss the various challenges facing the media industry, including how the economic downturn has affected advertising revenue, how the launch of new artificial intelligence technology is impacting content production and how more privacy laws mean it's time to buckle down on first-party data practices. During those three days, publishers will also be learning from each other about different strategies to navigate this tumultuous time.In this week's episode of the Digiday Podcast, Digiday's senior media editor Tim Peterson, senior reporter Sara Guaglione and media editor Kayleigh Barber share some of the on-stage sessions that they are most excited about and chat through the trends they expect will come up at DPS.Digiday will have a variety of coverage around the summit, including session recaps, overheard round-ups and a live podcast recording with Michelle DeVine, svp of programmatic and client partnerships, retail, at BuzzFeed, which will go live on Tuesday, April 4. Stay tuned for more insights coming out of DPS later this month.

NBC News has taken a two-pronged approach to TikTok. In addition to adapting news videos posted to other platforms for the short-form vertical video app, the Comcast-owned news organization creates original videos specifically for TikTok.NBC News executive producer of original social video Devan Joseph and director of social platforms Stephanie Scrafano joined the Digiday Podcast for a deep dive into the news outlet’s multi-faceted TikTok strategy.The primary poles of that TikTok strategy are the newsier videos produced by Scrafano’s nine-person team and then the feature-esque explainers created by Joseph’s six-person team. Overall, the work spreads across the teams — into more of a spectrum.“It’s kind of like the news will start with my team and that step-forward, that deeper dive will come from Devan’s team. So it’s a nice split between our teams because we can do it all in some way,” said Scrafano. “We’re live-clipping moments as they happen and then Devan’s team might come in and do the explainer or push the story forward in some way.”“It’s weird when we try to explain our teams to outside people because to us, day to day, it feels like we’re just one giant team,” said Joseph. He added, “It is shocking how smooth the process is, considering there’s so many people from different parts of the org working together.”

Nearly three years after advertisers and agencies pledged to diversify their spending to support Black-owned media companies, there remains a shortfall in the amount of money actually making it to Black-owned media businesses.“We’ve definitely seen movement and momentum. But without question, I think that they have fallen very short from the promises that they’ve made. And even this year, with all the talk about the recession and with all of the cuts, I think even their desire to deliver on those commitments are even smaller,” said Detavio Samuels, CEO of Revolt on the latest episode of the Digiday Podcast.As a Black-owned media company that was founded by Sean Combs and operates a TV network as well as streaming and digital properties, Revolt has worked to address one of advertisers’ top complaints: “That there was not enough inventory in Black-owned media in order to deliver against the commitments,” Samuels said. Among those efforts have been Revolt’s launches of free, ad-supported streaming TV channels across services including most recently Vizio’s WatchFree+.“There are thousands of FAST channels that exist today. But when you look at those FAST channels, most of the platforms that have FAST channels have somewhere between zero to maybe two Black content-focused channels. And so we see that as a massive opportunity,” Samuels said.Despite advertisers’ DE&I shortcomings and the overall shrinking of the traditional TV business, Revolt’s revenues have continued to grow, and its digital revenue has surpassed its linear TV revenue despite the latter revenue stream continuing to grow.“Now our digital revenue is much larger than our linear revenue. Over the last few years, we’ve seen our digital revenue growth about 9x to 10x, whereas our linear revenue has probably grown closer to 4x to 5x. And so streaming and digital is without question the biggest portion of our business right now,” Samuels said.